Open a photo, for instance, and you can rotate or crop it, tweak colours and brightness, remove red-eye, adjust levels, sharpen or blur the photo. A new Clone tool helps to erase areas in a photo by moving content from another page of the image; the Perspective Correction tool will correct many common perspective problems; and content-aware resizing zooms in on the content you need, while preserving other parts of the photo.

If you'd prefer to get creative, then just open the Designs Gallery and take a look at the some of the possible projects: Flash animations, photo albums, calendars, greetings cards, invitations, brochures, business cards, CD and DVD covers, presentations, animated GIF banners, web site templates, and more. (Please note, only a few of these are included in this trial download. You can see thumbnails of the others, though, which is enough to get a good idea of their design quality.)

And it's now easier than ever to share your work. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer includes a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, providing up to 500MB of online storage space and your own URL.

Note the above review applied to Photo & Graphic Designer 6. This is the brand new v7 which ships with a whole host of new features, such as a Photo Magic Erase Tool which will remove unwanted objects from photos, 'magic snap' for object alignment, tabbed document windows and lots of new features for web designers. See the What's New information for more detailed v7 new features.

Verdict

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is a comprehensive graphics application that comes packed with useful functionality. Interface issues mean it may take a while to find your way around, but there's plenty of help and you'll soon feel at home.